With the increasing popularity of Internet commerce and network centric computing, businesses and other organizations are becoming more and more reliant on information. To handle all of this data, storage area networks or SANs have become very popular. A SAN typically includes a number of storage devices, a plurality of hosts, and a number of switches arranged in a Switching Fabric that connects the storage devices and the hosts.
Fibre Channel frames are used for communication between hosts and storage devices within a Fabric. A Fibre Channel frame header carries the addresses for the source and destination devices (e.g., Fibre Channel addresses or FCIDs). When a host wishes to access a storage device, the FCIDs of the host and the storage device are inserted into the source and destination fields of the header. The switches within the fabric then route the frame to the target storage device using the destination FCID. The target device generates a response frame that includes its own FCID in the source field and the FCID of the host in the destination field. The frame is then routed back across the fabric in a similar way.